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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

neilzone.co.uk

301–310 of 645 posts

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#301
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept There is a similar story with Ford and how they build pavement everywhere and taught the young population that roads are for cars. Now we have to drive for 10 minutes to get from one shop on the plaza to another shop on the different plaza.

It was the bikes who fought for pavement everywhere. Cars took it all over. Mud is annoying to walk it, but otherwise humans handle bare dirt just fine.

The Romans built roads across Europe instead of mud paths two thousand years before bikes were invented. Humans might be able to cross dry compacted dirt, but do much better on engineered roads than on deep, wet, sticky, slippy mud, even before thinking about carts and wagons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads_in_Britannia

Unless you mean something else, but Paris was paving roads in the 1750s, a lifetime before even the hobby-horse Draisine was invented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam#Pierre-Marie-J%C3%A9r%...

On that page it's mentioned that Macadam (predecessor to tarmac) was used in the USA in 1823 on a stretch of road of 10 miles which took stagecoaches 5 hours to pass in the winter before it was Macadamized, suggesting quite a desire for better roads a century before safety bicycles with chains were invented.

Then 'History of the bicycle' says:

"On the new macadam paved boulevards of Paris it was easy riding ... the "bone-shaker" enjoyed only a brief period of popularity in the United States, which ended by 1870. here is debate among bicycle historians about why it failed in the United States, but one explanation is that American road surfaces were much worse than European ones, and riding the machine on these roads was simply too difficult."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_a...

Although apparently it was a thing in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

"The Good Roads Movement occurred in the United States between the late 1870s and the 1920s... a coalition between farmers' organizations groups and bicyclists' organizations .. Early organizers cited Europe where road construction and maintenance was supported by national and local governments."

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the philosophy behind Safety Third.

Just curious, what come first and second in this use of the phrase applied to computer security? I came to know the expression from fire circus performance and adjacent circles, where first and second are safety of the audience and the venue, and third is your own. I use it often when I'm about to knowingly do something sketchy or potentially dangerous without applying safety practices required "by the book", acknowl…

Interesting, I haven't heard of safety third from circus circles, I've always known it as more along the liens of if safety were actually the number one priority, no one would actually do anything because it's too risky.

In terms of cybersecurity, I see it as "security first" culture means people rely on the system to keep them safe. "Safety third" (or security third) emphasizes that everyone should already know they are operating in a risky and dangerous environment and take security as a personal responsibility.

It's just a reminder that no one cares about your life more than you do, so stay vigilant and take personal responsibility.

edit just realized I didn't actually answer your question on the first and second priorities.

I suppose First would be the reason the system exists in the first place (buy something online, for example). Second would be the user experience of doing the thing. Security should help you take calculated risks rather than prevent you from taking any risks at all.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#303
post #12

Honestly seems like the moral panic of the day. I was just reading about some “red vs blue” school meme in London which led to a lot of hand wringing and parents keeping their kids at home. The kicker? There was no actually school battles, it was a viral meme (mostly consumed by adults) and the kids just thought it was a joke. Pretty much sums up all modern discourse in banning social media and doing age checks. When…

>Why do they feel compelled to control the younger generation?

Mental health issues in the young have gone through the roof since 2010. There is definitely a problem, whether this solves it is another matter.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the fine print. You’re usually not consenting to cookies, you’re consenting to having your data gathered, processed, enriched and sold by hundreds of companies around the world. One click usually gives random foreign corpos the right to your data across a multitude of platforms, the right to identify you across data sets, and to permanently link your device identifiers to you, for ”fraud detection” on a site whi…

Ok, so suppose I am consenting to all of those things. I still have the same question… how is my life going to be made worse by that happening?

Are you saying ”I don’t have anything to hide”?

All of your data starts affecting everything your data is used for.

You may get worse rates for a mortgage, or not get one at all. You may be denied insurance or insurance claims. Cherry-picked details of your online activities may be used against you in a court of law, if you ever find yourself in one for any reason (think custody).

These are the very mild examples from a somewhat functional society. In the other end of the spectrum, where societal breakdown is imminent, you have things like getting disappeared, thrown in a concentration camp, executed on your own front yard.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#305
post #6

I was sitting in a room the other day with a young adult, we were searching for additional algorithm learning materials. They searched in Google, and accept the cookies. They clicked on a website, and accepted those cookies too. They then started entering their email address to access another service. I was completely taken aback. I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entire…

Does it even actually matter what you do? How many lawsuits/investigations have there been in the last decade revealing that some company or another that swore up and down was following privacy laws, protecting your data, and not selling it actually were. I'm at the point where I figure anyone who wants to track me is, and any privacy pop-ups or the like are just for show.

Yeah it's really not worth my mental energy. Sometimes I take the time to reject tracking cookies. But I figure everyone's tracking me and everyone has my SSN at this point, and as long as my credit files are locked I don't really care. Like why do I even care if people are linking all my browsing data together and then using it to market stuff to me.

FWIW I'm 43 and grew up on the dark parts of the internet.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#306
post #60

I'm fine with providing my identity for online banking and other finance platforms for legal & taxation purposes. I can't think of a single other use case in which I'd be willing to verify my identity. I'd rather go back to hosting email myself, and am fine with circumventing content access control for all other platforms for personal use. We're seeing the world slide towards authoritarian strongmen, and we want to g…

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective. Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a us…

> Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification.

Then they should say so. Elected officials lying to and misleading the public when their real intentions differ is almost criminal. It's not a behavior anyone should ever support. I will not vote for people who do that.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#307
post #228

I completely agree. The only services for which I will verify my age (and the entire rest of my ID) are bank accounts and other services involving a real legal requirement for real ID. The notion that you should upload a passport to random sites for age verification is unbelievably dangerous. That's a recipe for identity theft. And face scanning is also an invasion of privacy, not to mention very unreliable (my 16 ye…

1000% this. Fake info for everything that isn't directly tied to money or government. HN doesn't have my info. Apple doesn't have it. Google doesn't have it. Amazon doesn't have it. Microsoft doesn't have it. They don't care who I really am, and that hasn't, ever never, been a problem for using their stuff. They want your real ID. They do not need it. At all.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. the effort and cost to download an ad-blocker that automatically removes the prompt to accept/deny entirely is practically zero and the amount of clicks you'd save yourself would quickly exceed the clicks it took to install the blocker. > I just don’t think it is something that is worth st…

> I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why. Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about…

> Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be?

There are countless ways the data collected about you can be used against you. Companies are using this data for everything from setting prices, to deciding which policies they'll apply to you, what services they'll offer or deny you, even shit as trivial as deciding how long they should leave you on hold when you call them on the phone. It's been used to deny people housing, or employment. It's even resulted in innocent people being arrested and investigated by law enforcement. This guy (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...) wasn't worried about Google tracking everywhere he went until he had to get his parents to clean out their savings to pay for a lawyer in order to prove his innocence.

AI is only going to make it easier for companies to leverage the massive amounts of data they've collected against us. Companies have been trying to get consumers to accept discriminatory pricing practices this data enables for a very long time (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3) and it looks like they're starting to wear us down. Digital price tags are becoming increasingly common. So are demands that consumers scan QR codes to get prices. Prices don't have to be set so high that they become unaffordable to you, they can just slowly eat away at more and more of your earnings.

The system is set up so that you will never know when or how the data being collected about you is used against you, but every company is looking to leverage that data to their advantage every chance they get. I get that it's easy to feel defeated and think "My ISP already sells my browsing history, Google chrome already collects all by browsing history, so who cares if I let 30 other random companies collect it too by accepting their tracking cookies on every website I visit?" but those companies collecting your data care very much and it's not because they have your best interests in mind. They aren't going through all the trouble to track you across every website you visit because it doesn't matter. Taking a few basic steps to help protect yourself is just the smart thing to do, especially when it's something as simple as using an ad blocker or an add-on to auto-reject the countless "Can we track you" requests.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#309
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.

I disagree, because there’s always a chunk of advertising that seems to be all about targeting low-income or people who aren’t financially savvy and I don’t think it’s ethical for an apparatus to take advantage of them.

I think if a product is harmful, advertising it should be banned. Alcohol, drugs, gambling ads should be banned.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid forties, been working as a professional software developer for over 20 years. I click “accept the cookies” almost every time. I just personally don’t feel it’s worth the effort and cost to try to avoid it. What “dark pattern cookie trick” are you worried about? I just can’t come up with a scenario where it will actually harm me in any way. All the examples I have heard are either completely implausible…

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out.

I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.

You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.

I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.

If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.

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